I hung up on my best friend.
I had to get out of the house. I drove to the Redgum gym in Leichhardt and threw myself into a workout routine much more severe than usual-double sets on the machines, longer on the treadmill. I worked up a sweat and stuck at the free weights until I reached ‘fail’-when you can’t do another lift-something I usually avoid like the plague. Wesley Scott, the West Indian proprietor and trainer, gave me a massage. Deep tissue. Hurt like hell.
‘You’re strung tight, man,’ he said. ‘What’s troubling you?’
I told him with as few details as possible.
‘That’s tough. So you think putting yourself through this kinda pain is going to help?’
‘I’ll tell you something, Wes,’ I said as I rolled off the table. ‘I’m going to put some bugger through pain, no mistake.’
I showered and went home, denying myself the usual after-workout coffee in the Bar Napoli a few doors away. The activity had done me good. I went straight to the computer and began to look for Lily’s files. I didn’t find any current ones, just a couple of incomplete drafts of stories already published.
Lily could be secretive about her work, one of the reasons I never questioned her too closely. Had she been more so lately? I couldn’t remember. I got up and opened the wardrobe, thinking I’d better do something about the clothes. St Vincent de Paul seemed the best bet-Lily hadn’t gone in for Donna Karan power dressing. I took out the hanger holding the jacket and prepared to drop it over the back of the typing chair while I reached in for the next hanger. Something fell out of the jacket pocket-a packet of cigarettes. Like me, Lily had given up smoking years before. I hung the jacket back up, retrieved the packet from the floor and opened it. Hard pack. Twenty-three king size filter cigarettes. Two missing. Had she taken to the fags on the q.t.? I doubted it. But then I didn’t know she’d put me in her will.
The packet felt funny. I’d lapsed myself once or twice and had also bought them often enough for informants to know what they felt like, even though my own preference had been for rollies. I took the packet to the desk and shook it. Twenty-three cigarettes about two-thirds of their true length came out, then a layer of foil. Wedged in the bottom of the packet was a thumb drive.
Lily’s files were a chaos of notes, interview transcripts, downloaded material and draft paragraphs. How she honed them into the clear, insightful stories she produced was a mystery. The stuff bore her unmistakable imprint- frequent swearwords, wry asides and capitals for emphasis, the way she’d written in notes left for me and in her emails and postcards. I made a pot of coffee and sat down to work out what she’d been doing. One thing was clear: she’d kept a running record of the dates of the writing and research in reference to the deadlines she entered at the top of the files. This was all very recent work.
As always, Lily had been working on several stories at once. There appeared to be three-a piece about money laundering by a media personality, an investigation of a political figure suspected of running interference with the immigration authorities for a mate in the sex-slave business, and a publisher with a couple of current best-seller non-fiction books on his list, but no royalties paid to the writers or wages to his staff or the printers, and the publisher nowhere to be found.
I scratched the last one as being of interest only to the chattering classes and unlikely to involve the police, whose interest in literature is limited to say the least. The other two stories had distinct possibilities of a police connection. I scrolled through them, making notes on the dates, initials and financial details. Lily had told me that she used initials in the early stages of her investigations, partly for security purposes, partly because it amused her. She also said that she reversed and scrambled the initials which could be unscrambled by a key known only to herself. I’d laughed at her and told her she was bullshitting. She hadn’t contradicted me, but she’d winked and called me a naive gumshoe.
So I was left with two investigations of serious crimes and a jumble of initials which might relate directly to the people involved or might not. Probably not. The image of Lily winking came back to me in full force. She’d meant it. I dealt mostly with the obvious, she plumbed some dodgy depths. I copied the notes and the two files onto a disk and tried to see if Lily had accessed any emails via my computer. I knew her address and logged on. Nothing. Careful Lily, I thought, but you protected your work better than yourself, and I wasn’t there
…
I’d drunk three cups of strong black coffee and was a bit wired. I took the disk out of the computer and put it on the desk with the thumb drive. I was buzzing, connecting, jumping ahead of myself. There was an obvious way to flush out Lily’s killer, if it had anything to do with what she’d been working on-it had to have, didn’t it? — and that was to let whoever was interested know that I had the incriminating material. Was I up for that? Yes, I was, but how to do it?
Lily hadn’t neglected security. She’d installed a sophisticated alarm system in her house which had either been bypassed or she’d forgotten to activate it. Not unknown. Whoever I was up against now was good at whatever he, or she, or they, did. But so was I.
6
I phoned Daphne Rowley to ask her if the cops had checked on my alibi for the early part of the night of Lily’s death.
‘Just now,’ she said.
‘How d’you mean?’
‘This D got me on the phone and then came around. Had a policewoman with him.’ She gave an amused snort. ‘For protection, I guess.’
‘That’d be Gregory, would it?’
‘No. Hang on, I’ve got his card here… hard-nut wog named Kristos.’
Nothing politically correct about Daphne. ‘Came on strong, did he?’
‘I’ll say. He wanted to know the exact time you arrived and when you left. How many games we played, how long we held the table. The lot.’
‘What did you tell him?’
‘What I could remember. Who keeps track of time when the balls are clicking, if you’ll excuse the expression, and the schooners’re going down?’
‘Right. Did he take notes?’
‘You kidding? He left that to the sheila and her Palm Pilot-Constable What’s-her-face.’
‘Farrow?’
‘That’s it. She seemed okay, for a copper.’
I thanked her and rang off. Here was a new player and a new level of interest, and I wondered why. I got the answer within a few minutes when Tony Truscott appeared at my door. He was wearing sweats and said he’d been doing some jogging.
‘From Hunters Hill?’
‘Fuck, no. Around your Jubilee Park here. Lily… told me about it. Jogging’s so fucking boring you need to have something to look at. I like the water and the birds and the trees and the bridge, you know.’
‘Yeah. Coming in, Tony?’
‘No, mate, I have to be at the gym in half an hour. It was a good bash for Lily, wasn’t it?’
‘Sure was. So…?’
Like most boxers, Tony had trouble keeping still. It was fatal to do so in the ring, and the habit carried over into everyday life. He swayed and jiggled, just a little. ‘I heard from Lily’s solicitor about her will. Just wanted you to know, man, that it’s cool with me. You were good for her.’
‘Thanks, Tony. I dunno… it broke me up a bit.’
‘Yeah, well, the thing is, this fucking copper came around trying to make a big thing of it.’
‘Detective named Kristos?’
‘Yeah, you know him?’
In a strange way I felt I did, even though it was only the second time the name had come up. I’d met them before- middle-ranked officers aspiring to climb higher in the eyes of their loftier bosses.
‘Heard of him,’ I said. ‘What did he have to say?’
‘Wanted to know all about you, but his fucking meaning was clear-reckoned you could’ve killed Lily for the money.’